We've been following the evolution of solid state drives for some time now, highlighting the most relevant offerings at any given time, and noting the impact newer controllers had in improving performance. The last few months have been particularly busy with Intel, OCZ, and Crucial launching their next-gen offerings at different price points and capacities.

For now it appears SSDs will continue to get faster, but in terms of pricing they're still far from becoming mainstream. The good news is that the introduction of new SATA 6Gb/s drives will surely help to push down the price of older, yet still speedy models. With an investment of just over $100 you can already jump in with a small boot drive and notice a huge performance improvement relative to a traditional hard drive.

To ease your pain in choosing the right SSD, TechSpot has put together a condensed list with some of what we consider the best SSDs in the market right now, basing our picks on performance and highlighting a slightly slower alternative offering a better cost per gigabyte value.